Free falling

[Naniko D'Angelo]

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For Melody :o


She put the bowl down for a moment, rubbing her hands together. This was her special place, the tree that she always sat under when she worked with her herbs; the willow's branches swayed back and forth in the light breeze that swept over the lands, at the very edge of her line of sight. The green eyed wolf was taking a small break, looking down at the results of the morning's work. Right now she had a nice amount of willow bark ground up and ready for bottling. Willow bark was good for several things; it was known to be a fever reducer, and could help with other things like headaches, upset stomachs, and colds. You could never have too much of it, not with the amount of patients that came to her for help nowadays.


The winter had made the number of hurt animals skyrocket; she didn't see how anyone in the pack could be going hungry with this many injured creatures running around. Some came to her for help, and other she went out and hunted. It was in a wolf's instincts to go after the weakest in the herd...but if they came to her they were spared. At least until they healed completely. Then they were fair game, as she and they both knew. The hunter had just finished recovering from an injury of her own, a bad break on her back leg...a break caused by the Inferni coyotes. She'd had her suspicions about her mate Conri's dissapearance and had been running the borders with her cousin Poe when they had been attacked by the pair of devils.


Naniko had a lot to do, but she didn't want to get all of her work done at once. After she finished with work she'd be alone again. Solitude didn't set right with her; she was too used to having someone around to talk to that she didn't cope well with this sudden isolation. She was thinking about moving dens, to somewhere closer to the rest of the pack, just so that she might cross paths with them more often.


She picked up a new piece of bark and began grinding it. She'd think about it after she was finished with this.

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[Karin Sadira]

• Melody had only been brought back into her home pack for about a week and already she had pretty much completely assimilated herself into the pack. He was energetic and fun-loving, just like any other normal pup. Along with this came her natural curiosity for this new home that she was unfamiliar with. Already she had picked up a habit of wandering off on her own to explore her surroundings. A good amount of the time it was because she was chasing after some small little animal like a mouse, a vole or a white rabbit.
  
  This was the same case today. Melody had sniffed out a vole that had been hiding in the snow. Her curious nose sniffed him out and she began to dig. Her digging prompted the small creature to shoot out of his burrow across the ground and through the trees to another burrow. After chasing him, Melody began to dig again, and when she got too close, the vole shot back out again.
  
  This continued for quite some time until the creature that would have easily fit snugly in her mouth bolted into a den to find a hiding spot. Of course, Melody hadn't been thinking about where she was, or even where she was going, and darted in right after the little brown ball of fluff. She ran at full speed until she came into the heart of the occupied den and made to stop, but ended up tripping over her paws and tumbling into something. She wasn't quite sure what it was she ran into, but she did hear a loud crash as various objects tumbled to the floor.
  
  A small groan issued from the back of her throat, but it was more from disappointment than anything else. And so with a quick huff through her nostrils, the pup twisted herself until she was back on her paws and up sniffing around for her query. "Hey, where'd you go little fluff?" she called out, completely ignoring the fully grown wolf who's den she had just invaded as she began to sniff around for the vole. "Come on out I just wanna play." she finished as she slapped her paw against the cold floor and dug her claws lightly into where it had come down.
  
  She had taken a playful pose as she searched. Her head was down near the ground with her front paws as she sniffed for the creature she had chased for so long already while her hind end was sticking straight up in the air. Her playfulness was evident by this posture as well as the fact that her tail was swishing fairly forcefully from left to right about as high in the air as she could get it.

[Naniko D'Angelo]

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She often forgot parts of what it was like to be young. Her youth had been spent quickly, it seemed; her parents had left her and her twin in Chimera to go off by themselves, away from the pack…she’d been taken in by her father’s ex-mate, and cared for for a short while afterwards. She had wandered the territories, looking for her lost parents, for a while before she had accepted that they were gone, but while on search for Kaelyn and Roman she had taken a fall, a tumble over a cliff way out in the neutral territories. That was when she had first become involved with the Sadiras, another prominent family in Bleeding Souls.


It had been Iskata that had found her broken body and hauled her here, to Clouded Tears. And since then, this had been her home.


Her new mother had been kind to her. Soon after her arrival in Clouded Tears Iskata bore two pups, a little brother and sister. They grew quickly, and Naniko helped to care for them. She couldn’t be everywhere at once, though, and the two pups disappeared one day, swept away by the ocean. Iskata disappeared, as well.


They returned, her younger brother and mother, but were changed. The young male missed his mother, still needed her…and the half grown Naniko had no idea what to do about that. She was too young to know how to care for a pup; she hadn’t had the instincts that an adult would have had. But she’d managed, bringing the young one half-chewed meals and making sure that he stayed nice and warm at night. It took a toll on her, and she realized after a few weeks that she could not to it all on her own. Her friend Conri, currently a member of the Syemv/Aremys pack, came to live with her to help her. Eventually they became mates. Iskata returned a few months later, to join Storm and become mates with the alpha there. Naniko’s little brother, the one she had cared for, grew into a Lehrling and drifted away. Her mate disappeared.


And here she was now.

The green eyed wolf jumped when something hit her, knocking her entire bowl over. She stood quickly, on alert, gathering some of the dust back and flipping the bowl back upright, putting the dust back in. More than half of it was ruined, though, scattered over the dirt floor of the den. She turned to see what it was that had spilled everything, to see who had made such a horrible mess of all of her hard work—


And met the eyes of a pup. Since when had Clouded Tears had puppies? She didn’t know that any of the members were pregnant, that any had been born. So where had this one come from? She could see that the little one hadn’t realized that she had done anything wrong; she seemed to be in a good mood, judging on the way her tail was whipping back and forth like it was.


”I think it’s gone for good” She commented; she’d caught a glimpse of what the pup had been chasing, one of the quick little rodents that lived nearby, I’m surprised you were able to get that close to it; those things tire me out”


Naniko sat back, putting the bowl up on a shelf. ”You really should watch where you’re running next time, though; I could have had a fire going in here, and you would have stepped right into it”

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